Naked Lunch (18 page)

P
ARTY
L
EADER
(mixing another
scotch): ‘The next riot goes off like a football play. We have imported a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina.… All we need is one riot leader for the whole unit.’ His eyes sweep the table.

L
IEUTENANT:
‘But, chief, can’t we get them started and they imitate each other like a chained reaction?’

The Diseuse undulate through the Market: ‘What’s a Latah do when he’s alone?’

P.L.:
‘That a technical point. We’ll have to consult Benway. Personally, I think someone should follow through on the whole operation.’

‘I do not know,’ he said for lack of the requisite points and ratings to secure the appointment.

‘They have no feelings,’ said Doctor Benway, slashing his patient to shreds. ‘Just reflexes … I urge distraction.’

‘The age of consent is when they learn to talk.’

‘May all your troubles be little ones as one child molester say to the other.’

‘It’s really ominous, my dear, when they start trying on your clothes and give you those doppelganger kicks.…’

Frantic queen trying to claw sport jacket off departing boy.

‘My two hundred dollar cashmere jacket,’ she screeches.…

‘So he has an affair with this Latah, he wants to dominate someone complete, the silly
old thing.… The Latah imitates all his expression and mannerisms and simply sucks all the persona right out of him like a sinister ventriloquist’s dummy.…“You’ve taught me everything you are.… I need a new amigo.” And poor Bubu can’t answer for himself, having no self left.’

J
UNKY:
‘So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup.’

P
ROFESSOR:
‘Coprophilia … gentlemen … might
be termed the hurumph … redundant vice.…’

‘Twenty years an artist in the blue movies and I never sink so low as fake an orgasm.’

‘No good junky cunt hang up her unborn child.… Women are no good, kid.’

‘I mean this dead level conscious sex … Might as well take your old clothes to the Laundromat.…’

‘And right in the heat of passion he says, “Do you have an extra shoe tree?”’

‘She tell me how
forty Arabs drag her into a mosque and rape her presumably in sequence.… Though they’re bad to push – all right, end of the line, Ali. Really, my pets, most distasteful routine I ever listen to. I was after being raped myself by a pride of rampant bores.’

A group of sour Nationalists sits in front of the Sargasso sneering at the queens and jabbering in Arabic.… Clem and Jody sweep in dressed
like The Capitalist in a communist mural.

CLEM:
‘We have come to feed on your backwardness.’

J
ODY:
‘In the words of the Immortal Bard, to batten on these Moors.’

N
ATIONALIST:
‘Swine! Filth! Son of dogs! Don’t you realize my people are hungry?’

C
LEM:
‘That’s the way I like to see them.’

The Nationalist drops dead, poisoned by hate.… Dr. Benway rushes up: ‘Stand back everybody, give me air.’
He takes a blood sample. ‘Well, that’s all I can do. When you gotta go you gotta go.’

The travelling queer Christmas tree burns bright on the rubbish heaps of home where boys jack off in the school toilet – how many young spasms on that old oaken seat worn smooth as gold.…

Sleep long in the valley of the Red River where cobwebs hang black windows and boy bones.…

Two Negro fags shriek at each
other.

F
AG 1:
‘Shut up, you cheap granuloma gash.… You known as Loathsome Lu in the trade.’

D
ISEUSE:
‘The girl with the innaresting groin.’

F
AG
2: ‘Meow. Meow.’ He slips on leopard skin and iron claws.…

F
AG
1: ‘Oh oh. A Society Woman.’ He flees screaming through the Market, pursued by the grunting, growling transvestite.…

Clem trips a spastic cripple and takes his crutches.… He does a hideous
parody twitching and drooling.…

Riot noises in the distance – a thousand hysterical Pomeranians.

Shop shutters slam like guillotines. Drinks and trays hang in the air as the patrons are whisked inside by the suction of panic.

C
HORUS OF
F
AGS:
‘We’ll all be raped. I know it, I know it.’ They rush into a drugstore and buy a case of KY.

P
ARTY
L
EADER
(holding up his hand dramatically): ‘The voice
of the People.’

Pearson the Money Changeling comes acropping the short grass seized by the extortionate commandant of Karma, hiding in a vacant lot with the garter snakes, to be sniffed out by the scrutable dog.…

The Market is empty except for an old drunkard of indeterminate nationality passed out with his head in a pissoir. The rioters erupt into the Market yiping and
screaming ‘Death to the
French’ and tear the drunkard to pieces.

S
ALVADOR
H
ASSAN
(squirming at a keyhole): ‘Just look at those expressions, the whole beautiful protoplasmic being
all exactly alike.’
He dances the Liquefactionist Jig.

Whimpering queen falls to the floor in an orgasm. ‘Oh God it’s too exciting. Like a million hot throbbing cocks.’

B
ENWAY:
‘Like to run a blood test on those boys.’

A portentously inconspicuous
man, grey beard and grey face and shabby brown djellaba, sings in slight unplaceable accent without opening his lips:

‘Oh you dolls, you great big beautiful dolls.’

Squads of police with thin lips, big noses and cold grey eyes move into the Market from every entrance street. They club and kick the rioters with cold, methodical brutality.

The rioters have been carted away in trucks. The shutters
go up and the citizens of Interzone step out into the square littered with teeth and sandals and slippery with blood.

The sea chest of the dead man is in the Embassy, and the vice consul breaks the news to mother.

There is no … Morning … Daybreak …
n’existe plus
.… If I knew I’d be glad to tell you. Either way is a bad move to the East Wing … He is gone through an invisible door.… Not here …
You can look any place.… No good … No bueno … Hustling myself.… C’lom Fliday.

(Note: Old time, veteran Schmeckers, faces beaten by grey junk weather, will remember.… In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they say:

‘No glot.… C’lom Fliday.…’)

Islam Incorporated and the Parties
of Interzone

I was working for an outfit known as Islam Inc., financed by A. J., the notorious Merchant of Sex, who scandalized international society when he appeared at the Duke de Ventre’s ball as a walking penis covered by a huge condom emblazoned with the A.J. motto ‘They Shall Not Pass.’

‘Rather bad taste, old boy,’ said the Duke.

To which A. J. replied: ‘Up yours with Interzone K.Y.’
The reference is to the K.Y. scandal which was still in a larval state at that time. A.J.’s repartee often refers to future events. He is a master of the delayed squelch.

Salvador Hassan O’Leary, the After Birth Tycoon, is also involved. That is, one of his subsidiary companies has made unspecified contributions, and one of his subsidiary personalities is attached to the organization in an advisory
capacity without in any way committing himself to, or associating himself with, the policies, actions or objectives of Islam Inc. Mention should also be made of Clem and Jody, the Ergot Brothers, who decimated the Republic of Hassan with poison wheat, Autopsy Ahmed, and Hepatitis Hal, the fruit and vegetable broker.

A rout of Mullahs and Muftis and Husseins and Caids and Glaouis and Sheiks and
Sultans and Holy Men and representatives of every conceivable Arab party make up the rank and file and attend the actual meetings from which the higher ups prudently abstain. Though the delegates are carefully searched at the door, these gatherings invariably culminate in riots. Speakers are often doused with gasoline and burned to death, or some uncouth desert Sheik opens
up on his opponents
with a machine gun he had concealed in the belly of a pet sheep. Nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass mingle with the assembled conferents and suddenly explode, occasioning heavy casualties.… And there was the occasion when President Ra threw the British Prime Minister to the ground and forcibly sodomized him, the spectacle being televised to the entire Arab World. Wild yipes of joy were heard
in Stockholm. Interzone has an ordinance forbidding a meeting of Islam Inc. within five miles of the city limits.

A. J., – he is actually of obscure Near East extraction – had at one time come on like an English gentleman. His English accent waned with the British Empire, and after World War II he became an American by Act of Congress. A. J. is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one
has ever been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy.… I believe he is on the Factualist side (which I also represent); of course he could be a Liquefaction Agent (the Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption). You can never be sure of anyone in the industry.

A.
J.’s cover story? An international playboy, and harmless practical joker. It was A. J. who put the piranha fish in Lady Sutton-Smith’s swimming pool, and dosed the punch with a mixture of Yage, Hashish and Yohimbine during a Fourth of July reception at the U.S. Embassy, precipitating an orgy. Ten prominent citizens – American, of course – subsequently died of shame. Dying of shame is an accomplishment
peculiar to Kwakiutl Indians and Americans – others simply say
‘Zut alors’
or
‘Son cosas de la vida’
or ‘Allah fucked me, the All Powerful.…’

And when the Cincinnati Anti-Fluoride Society met to toast their victory in pure spring water, all their teeth dropped out on the spot.

‘And I say unto you, brothers and sisters of the Anti-Fluoride movement, we have this day struck such a blow for purity
as will never call a retreat.… Out, I say, with the filthy foreign fluorides! We will sweep this fair land sweet and clean as a young boy’s tensed flank.… I will now lead you in our theme song
The Old Oaken Bucket.’

A well head is lighted by fluorescent lights that play over it in hideous juke-box colors. The Anti-Fluorides file past the well singing as each dips up a drink from the oaken bucket.…

‘The old oaken bucket, the gold oaken bucket

The glublthulunnubbeth …’

A. J. had tampered with the water, inserting a South American vine that turns the gums to mush.

(I hear about this vine from an old German prospector who is dying of uremia in Pasto, Columbia. Supposed to grow in the Putumayo area. Never located any. Didn’t try very hard.… The same citizen tells me about a bug like a big
grasshopper known as the Xiucutil: ‘Such a powerful aphrodisiac if one flies on you and you can’t get a woman right away you will die. I have seen the Indians running around pulling themselves off from the contact with this animal.’ Unfortunately I never score for a Xiucutil.…)

On opening night of the New York Metropolitan A. J., protected by bug repellent, released a swarm of Xiucutils.

Mrs.
Vanderbligh swatting at a Xiucutil: ‘Oh … Oh! … OOOOOOOOOOOH!!!’ Screams, breaking glass, ripping cloth. A rising crescendo of grunts and squeals and moans and whimpers and gasps.… Reek of semen and cunts and sweat and the musty odor of penetrated rectums.… Diamonds and fur pieces, evening dresses, orchids, suits and underwear litter the floor covered by a writhing, frenzied, heaving mass of naked
bodies.

A. J. once reserved a table a year in advance
Chez Robert
where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine
in the world. So baneful and derogatory in his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate.

So A. J. arrives with six Bolivian Indians who chew coca leaves between courses.
And when Robert, in all his gourmet majesty, bears down on the table, A. J. looks up and yells: ‘Hey, Boy! Bring me some ketchup.’

(Alternative: A. J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine.)

Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a
soufflé
drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with
a meat cleaver.… The Sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple.… He breaks offa bottle of Brut Champagne …’26.… Pierre, the Head Waiter, snatches up a boning knife. All three chase A. J. through the restaurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage.… Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor.… Cries of ‘Lynch him!’ ring through the air. An
elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandril is fashioning a hangman’s knot with a red velvet curtain cord.… Seeing himself cornered and in imminent danger of dismemberment at least, A. J. plays his trump card.… He throws back his head and lets out a hog call; and a hundred famished hogs he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant, slopping the haute cuisine. Like a great tree
Robert falls to the floor in a stroke where he is eaten by the hogs: ‘Poor bastards don’t know enough to appreciate him,’ says A. J.